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Cell Phones Used to Spy in Missouri

If you live in Missouri, you might want to know that you cell phones are being watched ? closely. $3 million will now be spent annually on a monitoring program by the Missouri Department of Transportation. This program will monitor the movement of individuals on highways via their cell phones, and this will take place without their consent or knowledge. GPS will not be used as the official technology. Rather, the signals sent to the towers by wireless phones will be tracked as they move from one tower to another. Highway map grids will be drawn to check how fast phones are moving and where they are located at all times.

In what would be the largest project of its kind, the Missouri Department of Transportation is negotiating with private contractors to monitor thousands of cell phones, using their movements to produce real-time traffic conditions on 5,500 miles of roads statewide. Privacy advocates are concerned about a technology that can track people. But transportation and technology leaders say the data gathered will remain anonymous.

A pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000 miles of road. AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia. However, the Missouri project is by far the most aggressive - tracking wireless phones across a whole state, including in rural areas with lower traffic counts, and doing so for the explicit purpose of relaying the information to other travelers.